The present invention relates to maintaining social network privacy and more particularly providing identity anonymization within the context of a social network by implementing noninvertible morphed communities.
The ability to provide identity anonymization within the context of a social network has become a significant challenge. For example, even though an individual's actual identity and details may be secure within a social network (i.e., the user may simply be known via a screen name), the identity of the user could still be deduced based on relationships the user may have. Even if identity or features that could be used to infer the details about an individual are hidden, the cardinality (i.e., number) of features or links within a graph can be used to infer the identity of an individual. For example, if a user belongs to a given community, the member will be connected to a certain number of records. The number of connections that a user maintains to a community as well as to other communities could increase the likelihood of determining the identity of an individual. The social theory of the Common Knowledge Effect brings users together that have commonality. After just one identity is compromised within a network, it becomes easier to infer the identities of other group members based upon the discovered user's profile. As such, protecting the graph cardinality is just as important as maintaining anonymized members.
The problem becomes worse as a member is connected to multiple communities. As the number of connections to other communities becomes known, the probability of determining who the person is within the social environment increases.